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Thesis/Dissertation Prospectus College of Humanities and Social Sciences THESIS/DISSERTATION PROSPECTUS COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Candidate: Theresa Neman SSN/Student ID: 0111-111 Department: ENGLISH Degree: MA Proposed Topic: Warburton’s Pope: A Matter of Editorship Please attach a copy of the Thesis/Dissertation Prospectus as required by your department. Please see department instructions for preparation of your prospectus. Thesis/Dissertation Committee Approval: Printed Name Signature Dr. Paul Child, Thesis Director Dr. Robert Adams Dr. Audrey Murfin Administrative Approval: Director, Graduate Studies in English Date Chair, Department of English Date Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences Date Thesis Prospectus: Warburton’s Pope: A Matter of Editorship Theresa Neman The Critical Problem: In the later years of his life, declining in health, his closest friends dead or distanced, Alexander Pope chose William Warburton to act as executor of his estate and editor of his works. This appointment of Warburton has generally been seen as a reward for his public defense of Pope against attacks upon The Essay on Man. In 1751, seven years after Pope’s death, Warburton produced an edition of the Collected Works laden, in Scriblerian fashion, with elaborate footnotes, extensive commentary, essays-in-brief tracing sources and allusions, and translations of Pope’s Latin and Greek transcriptions. He also included critical arguments about what he thought to be Pope’s intentions in various poems. Not long after the appearance of Warburton’s edition, readers questioned both the wisdom and the motives of his editing. Samuel Johnson suggested that Warburton could never restrain himself from “saying something when there is nothing to be said” (Evans 174). And in The Life of Pope, although acknowledging that Warburton “excelled in critical perspicacity,” Johnson remarks not long after that the editor “has endeavoured to find a train of thought which was never in the writer’s head” (426, 434). Other contemporaries also remarked incidentally upon the intrusive heavy-handedness of Warburton’s notes and commentary.1 More pointed critical attention to Warburton’s editorial apparatuses appeared in the nineteenth century. Isaac Disraeli, author of Quarrels with Authors, questioned the intent of the commentary and argued that Warburton used his control of Pope’s works as a machine to publish his own opinions. John 1 Miss Catherine Talbot wrote to Mrs. Elizabeth Talbot, “Our present after-supper author is Mr. Pope in Mr. Warburton’s edition….The notes are worth any body running over; some very wild, some very ingenious, some full of amusing anecdotes, some bitterly but not wittily satirical, but merely rough, unjust, and angry, and the greatest number, true commentator like, explaining what needs no explanation, and wire-drawing for meanings the author never thought of” (qtd. in Evans 174-77). Wilson Croker questioned the authenticity of the footnotes that Warburton attributed to Pope, insinuating that the editor had written them himself.2 For the most part, these early criticisms of Warburton’s notes and commentary were ad hominem attacks questioning his motives. But no one could do more than imply his intent and self-interest: Because Warburton, as executor of Pope’s estate, owned all of his papers, no critics had access to the manuscripts; they could not know if Pope had written notes attributed to him. Pope’s manuscripts did not survive, so the same obstacle continued to handicap readers in the twentieth century, when suspicions about Warburton’s motives and editorial manipulations grew. His biographer A W. Evans agreed that Warburton had used Pope and his control of Pope’s works to serve his own interests, but he made this assertion with less vitriol than Disraeli and Croker had. More recent scholars, including R.H. Griffin, John Trimble, and Seth Rudy, have also questioned the criticism that Warburton imposed on Pope’s works. Griffin, for example, accused him of altering Pope’s works, but he left open the suggestion that Warburton later reversed course and attempted to restore some of Pope’s works to their original states. Most recently, Howard Erskine-Hill has concluded that critics can neither trust nor ignore Warburton (Selected Letters). While one might contend that additional footnotes and other extra-literary devices would not impact the critical understanding of a work, many of Pope’s recent critics have held that both the extensiveness and authoritative tone of Warburton's additions do lead or mislead readers and, in their intrusiveness, interrupt the poetic rhythms and damage the coherence of the works. Warburton’s pedantries and ponderous prose, they argue, denature Pope’s verse. Such was the influence of Warburton’s editorial work that Pope’s reputation evolved from that of the most celebrated poet of the eighteenth century to that of a prose writer. 2 In 1831, Croker himself agreed to undertake an edition of Pope, but he died in 1857 before he was able to complete the work, The first volumes of his edition were published in 1871 (Sherburn, The Early Career 19-22). In 1880, Matthew Arnold remarked famously of Dryden and Pope that they “are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose” (9: 181). Thesis Objectives and Methodology: Those recent critics who have raised concerns about Warburton’s editorial “intrusions” have tended to do so incidentally in their discussions of Pope’s work; none has given primary attention to Warburton’s processes, commentaries, and notes on Pope’s complete works. While a comprehensive study of Warburton’s editing of Pope’s collected works is more than can be undertaken in this thesis, I will address both the nature and extent of the notes and commentaries in three important and representative pieces: An Essay on Man (1733-34), The Dunciad Variorum (1729), and The Rape of the Lock (1717) (listed here and addressed in the thesis in order of Warburton’s evolving role as Pope’s editor). Although I will avoid the temptation that other readers have indulged by impugning his motives, it does seem clear that Warburton, having insinuated himself into Pope’s favor, pursued an editorial course determined by his own literary and religious agenda. Operating with Pope’s permission to publish the poems, he included the notes and commentaries but left them, he claimed, “otherwise unchanged.”3 In fact, he changed wordings, rhymes, and couplets, and he added content within the footnotes that limited or obscured Pope’s original meanings. Some of Warburton’s notes claim that Pope himself “intended” these changes. Without further documentation, however, we cannot know. Although Pope’s autograph manuscripts are not available, access to both Pope’s works and Warburton’s editions of those same works in the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) database allows scholars now to compare the versions of both men. So in order to develop the discussion of Warburton’s role as editor, the thesis will reconstruct, as faithfully as 3 Pope specified in his last will and testament that Warburton could add commentaries and notes without altering the works themselves. possible from the available documents, a line of transmission from versions of Pope’s works published under his hand to the same poems in Warburton’s 1751 edition of the Collected Poems. It will then examine and analyze the editorial devices from the different versions, with an eye toward identifying Warburton’s additions, emendations, notes, and extra-literary commentary. Distinguishing Warburton’s work from Pope’s own is more complicated than it may seem at first because Warburton’s role as editor evolved under Pope’s own guidance. After Warburton, inexplicably and without solicitation, defended An Essay on Man in A Vindication of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man from the Misrepresentations of Mr. de Crousaz (1738), Pope befriended his apologist and invited his editorial suggestions. With An Essay on Man serving as an introduction of poet and editor, the two jointly produced an edition of the work in 1743, the year before Pope’s death. In the same year, a collaborative edition of The Dunciad Variorum appeared. The title page of An Essay on Man claims explicitly that Warburton provided “Commentary and Notes.”4 Because both works were produced jointly, however, it is difficult to distinguish the individual author of notes. In his later edition, Warburton appended the letter “P.” to notes that he claimed Pope himself had written. But scholars have contested these attributions, some suggesting that Warburton appropriated the “P.” for some of his own notes to give them authority. Warburton’s editorial role in The Rape of the Lock is easier to distinguish from Pope’s because poet and editor did not collaborate on any edition of the work in Pope’s own lifetime. Warburton’s 1751 edition of the mock-epic more clearly show his editorial hand. Thesis Outline: The thesis will comprise five chapters, the first an introduction, the next three discussions of Warburton’s editing of the three representative works, and the final one a brief conclusion: 4 Suggestively, the title page of the 1743 Dunciad promises “the Prolegomena of Scriblerus, and Notes Variorum” without mentioning Warburton by name. Chapter One: Introduction In this chapter I will lay out the critical problem, addressed earlier in this prospectus, and detail the history of Warburton’s and Pope’s personal and professional relationship. While Pope believed that he was befriending an apologist for his work, Warburton was well aware that he was befriending a poet who had the fortune, or misfortune, of being acknowledged a great writer in his own day. Commentators like Disraeli questioned his motives, especially because he had earlier written contemptuously of Pope in a letter, “Dryden, I observe, borrows for want of leisure, and Pope for want of genius!” (qtd. in 244) Under Pope’s favor, Warburton found his own literary fame and was introduced to Ralph Allen, who would settle him in a living, secure a bishopric for him, and even introduce him to his future wife; Allen, who had inherited much of Pope’s library, left his entire library, in turn, to Warburton.
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